


Boys Will Be Bugs

by CentralFirstLibrary



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Depression, I Can't Blame Him, I Do Not Believe He Will Make An Actual Appearance, I'm tagging it just to be safe, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Tavvy Dropped Out Of Uni And Refuses To Tell His Mother, Tavvy POV, gamzee is mentioned
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:28:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26795866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CentralFirstLibrary/pseuds/CentralFirstLibrary
Summary: You don't remember the last time you were in a car with your father being the one behind the wheel. Come to think of it, you don't think you have ever been in a car with your father behind the wheel. It was always the family driver, your new friends from school, the bus driver, or your Aunt June.Never your father.All that being said, you are happy he is the one driving you home. You don't think you could handle having this conversation with your mother and you think you'll push it off for as long as you can, even if that means her thinking you're still attending school and not dropping out to live with your father in his apartment that surely has no room for you in it.Even the largest of buildings with the most rooms possible in it wouldn't have enough room for you in it. You learned that early on in life.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 11





	Boys Will Be Bugs

**Author's Note:**

> When you learn that you might have more things in common with Tavvy than you'd like, you can't help but write about it. One might even say you kin him. So this is my new fic. I hope y'all like it. Please leave kudos and subscribe to the fic if you like it. Leave comments so I can hear what y'all think about it. They are my life source.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The titles to the chapters will all be the songs I listen to while writing this fic, I typically play them on repeat so eat chapter does get it's own song. I hope you enjoy them.

You don't remember the last time you were in a car with your father being the one behind the wheel. Come to think of it, you don't think you have ever been in a car with your father behind the wheel. It was always the family driver, your new friends from school, the bus driver, or your Aunt June. 

Never your father.

All that being said, you are happy he is the one driving you home. You don't think you could handle having this conversation with your mother and you think you'll push it off for as long as you can, even if that means her thinking you're still attending school and not dropping out to live with your father in his apartment that surely has no room for you in it.

Even the largest of buildings with the most rooms possible in it wouldn't have enough room for you in it. You learned that early on in life. 

**JAKE: Tavvy youre pulling on your sleeve again- are you alright?**

**JAKE: I promise i wont tell your mother a lick of what we spoke about.**

Looking up, you make eye contact with him through the rear view mirror and then look back down at your lap, letting go of your cardigan sleeve. It's starting to turn loose with how much you've been tugging at it anxiously. You really need to find another habit to use to fidget. Something that someone might not notice. So instead, you take your phone out and scroll through old messages. A few memes catch your eye and they help you breathe. If you text your cousin a random thank you he'll ask you far too many questions. So you'll wait until he sends you another one to do so. 

You never answered his question. 

Rubbing at your knee, you sigh heavily. Sometimes, out of habit to be quiet, you forget to breathe and it leads to you sighing loudly. It's so silly to think about. The body has certain functions that one can go without doing, such as humming or chewing. Then it has ones that happen even if someone doesn't think about it, breathing, swallowing, blinking. Sure someone can hold off on doing these things but eventually the body will win the fight and they'll have to happen. You've trained yourself to hold your breath to the point of forgetting it's a function you need to do to survive.

As you rub at your knee you hiss, it aches. You have a good feeling it's going to rain today and you are not looking forward to it. Your fingers squeeze around the brace and you shift in your seat, unbuckling so you can lay down in the backseat of the car. You watch your father as he comes to a stop, must be a red light, and he turns to check on you, flashing a gentle smile your way. But all you do is roll away from his gaze.

You understand he’s trying his best, you aren’t angry at him for anything. You’re just tired.

Tired and in pain. 

Crossing your arms over your face you take a deep breath and shut your eyes, listening to the wind outside the car, the humming of the road underneath the wheels, the beat of your father tapping his fingers on the steering wheel to the rhythm of the music playing on the radio. It’s all so loud. All you want is silence. The good silence, not that suffocating quiet you’ve dealt with for far too long.

It when the car shifts as it makes a deep turn and there are a few bumps before a pause do you know that-

**\-- You have reached your destination. --**

Sitting up you move to get out of the car, using your hip to shut the door behind you before moving to grab your duffle bag out of the passenger seat. You run your hand across the patch of the school’s logo and sigh before shutting that door, this time with your hand. You look at the small apartment and your lips curl up at the sight of squash blossoms starting to bloom in front of the porch. What a weird place to grow a vegetable garden. Walking up to the front door you set your bag down and turn, watching your father try to carry your things over. Sighing, you shake your head and move to try and take a couple boxes from him but he puts a hand up to you to stop you. 

In his hand there are the keys to the apartment, the car, the gardening shed and a few charms. 

**JAKE: Ive got this sonny. You just go on and rest your leg over in the living room that was quite the drive if i do say so myself.**

**JAKE: Ill get everything inside as long as you get that door open for me!**

Your father flashes a smile at you and all you can do is nod in response as you take the keys and try them out until you find which one of the two was the right one. With the door unlocked, you pick your bag back up and open the door, leaving it open as you carry the bag over to the sofa. You’ve been here all of three times since your parents divorced. Once when your father moved in, the second time was to visit him the Christmas of your first semester at University, and the third was when you spent your birthday with your Aunt June because you didn’t want to be home alone with your mother and her boyfriend.

Taking a seat on the sofa, you cuff the sleeves of your cardigan up and begin to go through your bag. No, you remember your laptop is in the box in the trunk. That’s alright, you don’t exactly need it right now. So, for now you take your shoes off and set them under the coffee table so you can lay your legs out across the sofa. It doesn’t take you a long time to roll over and take your round glasses off, setting them in your hair so you can relax for a little, trying to ignore the dull ache forming back up in your knee 

It’s too loud to.

How are you supposed to get any rest when you can hear the fridge buzzing, your father is walking in and out of the apartment to get the boxes because you’re apparently not allowed to, and the entire universe is just screaming right now?

You wish you could scream. Rolling back over, you sit up and look at your father as he shuts the door to the apartment and smiles as he walks over to you. He leans over the side of the sofa and takes your glasses off completely, setting them on the little table beside the couch and runs his fingers through your curls, patting your head with the gentlest touch.

**JAKE: You know tavvy- im excited for you to be here. I was thinking maybe we could work together on moving things around and turning the basement into my room so you could take the one i am in right now.**

**JAKE: Maybe we could turn it into a lounge area where we could play games and watch movies, you could even invite your friends over. How does that sound?**

Nodding your head, you slump against the sofa cushions and shut your eyes, earning yourself a hair ruffle from your father. 

It wasn't really an answer of any sort but it was good enough for him. He’ll have his own space and you won’t feel worse than you already do for kicking him out of his room. You regret telling him about everything. You could have figured something out without involving your family. But the more you think about that the more you feel like they would have found out eventually. 

_ She  _will find out eventually.

You really don’t want that. You can’t handle that conversation. If it wasn’t for the fact that you know your father visits your aunt and the family often, you would have ran to Harry for help. You know that he doesn’t exactly like you but it would have been better than making your father worry about you. Better than him having to change his entire way of life to accommodate you into living with him. 

You should have stayed in school. You should have just used the money your mother sends you to pay for school to pay for an apartment and run away. 

She would have found out. 

She is going to find out. 

She’s going to find out and you’re going to be in so much trouble. 

You’ll never hear the end of it. 

Disappointment, failure, just push through the pain, you’re exaggerating how much it hurts, your knee is fine, why can’t you just do what is asked of you, you should have never been bor-

**JAKE: Tav?**

You are pulled out of your thoughts at the sound of your father’s voice and you look up right into green eyes, your own turning away as you suck in a deep breath exhaling out a shaky one you didn’t realize you needed. 

**JAKE: Is it your leg? I can get you a hot compress if it hurts, just say the word kiddo..**

It is so weird to hear your father try to have a coherent conversation with you. Of course the one time he’s not stumbling over his own words and struggling to put a proper sentence together, you can’t bring yourself to reciprocate and hold said conversation. You shake your head and look down, rising to your feet you grab your glasses and put them on before moving to walk around the sofa. 

You’ve got nothing to say, and even if you did you don’t think any words will leave your lips anytime soon. 

With a sore knee and a headache making its way to you, you move to walk up the stairs and to your father’s bedroom. You’ll lay down here, at least in this room you can’t hear the fridge yelling at you. Not as loudly at least. You look at the room from the door and your lips try to curl up into a smile, they really do, but you’re too tired and a frown feels more natural even if how clean his room makes you happy. He probably cleaned up to the best of his ability when you called him for the first time about this. 

Your father does a lot for you. 

You wish you could tell him how much you appreciate his efforts.

Taking a deep breath you move and lay down on the bed, pulling the blankets to the side so you can get under them and try to get as comfortable as you can. The bed creaks beneath you and you roll your pants up to take the brace off. It’s too tight and you don’t want it to hurt more. Not that it’ll really stop anything, especially with the sound of rain starting to hit the window. Looking over at the glass, you watch the clouds start to go grey in the sky and you take your glasses off, setting them on a pillow before the blanket gets pulled over you and you roll onto your side. 

The bed is a lot more comfortable than you expected, maybe you have just gotten used to the stiffness of the bed you slept on in your dorm. Either way, even if the dull throb in your knee, sleep comes easy in this bed. You don’t hear your father come in and start taking his things out. You don’t hear him sit on the edge of the bed and put your glasses on the table before pulling the blanket down from over your face like you had it. You don’t hear him tucking you in or feel him kiss your head nor do you hear him shut the door behind him to leave you to rest on your own. And you certainly don’t hear him come back into the room to put a note saying dinner is in the microwave whenever you are ready to eat it.

**...**

You see the note once you wake up from your nap, if you can count a five hour period of sleep as a nap, and you hesitate to rise from bed. Instead you just sit up and stare off at the wall. 

You overslept, you can feel it in how exhausted you feel. Surely that exhaustion couldn’t be from anything else, right? Not the fear from keeping such a thing from your mother? Not you running away from the only sense of a normal life you had? Totally just you oversleeping in a bed that isn’t your own. Not that your dorm bed was really yours but it felt more like one than any other bed you’ve had in the past. 

You flinch at the sound of how loud your sigh was as you dig the heel of your palms into your eyes, trying to rub the tiredness from your body forcefully, and throw your legs over the side of the bed to stand up. You don’t bother putting your brace on, you know better than to wear it for more than you should. 

That would just cause more damage than any healing.

Pushing up from the bed, you grab you glasses as well as the note, taking it with you as you shuffle out of the room in the darkness of the hall. You left your phone in your bag, you can check on the time but by the look of the sky you wonder if your father is even awake. 

He is. 

You stand in the doorway of the kitchen and find him sitting on the kitchen floor with a mug of something. 

All you can see is him laying on the floor drunkenly passed out at your side when you were a toddler. 

You make eye contact and he smiles at you, putting his mug to the side as he pushes himself up from the floor, instantly walking over to you. He ruffles your hair and looks over at his mug. 

**JAKE: I made some cocoa..**

**JAKE: Would you like some?**

**TAVROS: No thank you,,,**

Shaking your head, you move over to the microwave, you set the note down on the counter and open the microwave to see what your father has plated for you. Two slices of pizza and a breadstick. 

Finally a smile. 

You shut the microwave and let it run for a whole minute, even if that will overheat it. 

You look over and watch your father sit back down on the floor, looking awfully comfortable there with his hot chocolate and watching some video on his phone. It’s probably a film. You wonder which one, your father has such a collection you’re surprised that he doesn’t have a subscription to more streaming platforms. You have them on your laptop under your mother’s account. Sure you have your own profile but you’re not the one paying for it. You wonder if you told him about it if he would use it or not. 

You wouldn’t blame him if he said no.

When the microwave beeps you jump and shut your eyes tightly. Dammit. You were distracted by your thoughts before you could open it. You’re good at opening it before it hits zero so it won’t beep loudly. Sometimes you hate the habits you feel the need to take to survive.

You take the plate out once the microwave stops beeping and you turn to head back upstairs.

JAKE: Heading up to eat?

You turn and look over your shoulder just nodding before heading right back up to eat on the bed. Eating alone has become something you find peace in. You mean no disrespect towards your father, you just hate having eyes on you while you’re eating. Eating as a family has never been a good thing. You don’t think it ever will be in the future either. 

Up the stairs you go. 

You make sure the door is shut behind you once you’re in the room, leaving you in the silence of the room. You set the plate down on the nightstand and take a seat on the bed. You push yourself up against the pillows and pull the plate to rest on your lap. You stare at your food, ignoring the tears that spill down your cheeks as you take the first bite. Your first meal since leaving school couldn’t taste more bitter. It’s gross and feels wrong in your mouth. You don’t finish it, you just leave the plate on the nightstand and curl right back up under the blankets, keeping your face covered as you always have since you started sleeping in a real bed.

It’s in the silence that you realize you forgot your phone again. You won’t go downstairs to get it. You won’t go downstairs at all. You only get interactions with your father when he comes into the room to continue clearing it out or to ask you if you’re hungry over the next week or so. Sometimes he invites you to watch a movie with him or to go on a walk with him. Updating you on him going out, whether it be to the store to go grocery shopping or to his appointments. You stay in your room, slowly retrieving your time passers whenever you get the courage to ask him to get them for you. 

You feel like you have bricks in your pockets and instead of walking right into an ocean with them, they just keep you in the bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed this, please remember to leave kudos, subscribe, and leave comments so I can hear your feedback. No comment is too long so please, I love reading what y'all have to say.


End file.
